Today’s generation of African artists is as vibrant as it is impacting private acquisitions, public collections and exhibitions around the world. But who are the most significant contemporary African artists and how can we engage with their works? How has African history influenced artists and what does the future hold for African art?

Published by Ilex Press, African Art Now by British-Ghanaian curator, critic, art historian, and curator of International Art at Tate Modern, Osei Bonsu, answers these important questions through interpretative texts, dialogues, profiles and analysis. Both emerging and established figures such as Emeka Ogboh, Elias Sime, Gabrielle Goliath, Edson Chagas and Amoako Boafo, are all featured in this necessary title.

Author Osei Bonsu is the Curator of International Art at Tate Modern and a leading voice in contemporary art. He was named Apollo magazine’s ’40 under 40′ leading African voices in 2020 among many other accolades.

The book opens with an interview between Bonsu and ‘Maro’ Miles, an English professional rugby union player who is championing African art. In 2021, Miles co-curated the exhibition A History Untold, celebrating the work of Black artists and thinkers throughout history. “What would your advice be to young people who maybe don’t see the value in art, but want to learn more about it?” Bonsu asks Miles. “My advice would be to do their best to try and experience it, to persevere, because art can amazingly subjective. It can give you a completely different thought process, and neither one of us is right or wrong.” He brilliantly responds.

This fantastic title features fifty African artists who are shaping art history. A phenomenon observed since the 1980’s, contemporary African art is undergoing a time of significant renaissance. African art takes centre stage at every art fair, galleries exhibitions and Biennales. The book includes an index of the various spaces framing Africa’s artistic ecosystem and explains the interest from wide audiences and art specialists.

African Art Now also celebrates a more complex concept of Africa as an all-embracing geography, shaped by diverse cultural and political forces that complicate outdated definitions of identity. Thinking beyond the limitations of citizenship and nationhood, contemporary African art today speaks to the power of self-identification in the shaping of global and cosmopolitan identities.

“No longer defined by Africa’s relationship to the past, African artists are building their own visual worlds shaped by a new sense of history, memory and identity. Reflecting on this landscape, African Art Now explores ways in which artists use diverse forms, languages, and materials to articulate what it means to be part of the world. They do this in ways which are both plural and singular, personal and political, local and universal; in ways that are entirely their own.” Osei Bonsu writes.

The beautiful book includes artists who are based on the African continent and those whose individual experiences of migration, exile and diaspora have shaped their relationship to Africa. Africa Now returns to several key ideas that aim to contextualise the dynamics of contemporary African art: Shifting identities, Reclaiming History, Postcolonial Dystopias, The Family Portrait and Future Ecologies.

This is an absolute must-have to discover new artists, understand important cultures and embrace the forceful and dynamic African cultural landscape.